None of the officials involved in Vermont's first taser
death will explain why it's almost three months since a Vermont State trooper
tasered Macadam Mason, a 39-year-old epileptic artist who died almost
immediately, and there's still no completed autopsy report.

The same officials in two states, Vermont and New Hampshire,
also failed to reveal last June that Taser International, the taser
manufacturer, almost immediately intervened in the investigation, submitting
guidance and background information for the Vermont State Police and the NH
medical examiner's office that was in the midst of performing Mason's
autopsy. That was June 21 and
Taser's involvement remained unknown to the public until reported September 9
by the Burlington
Free Press.

Taser's covert intervention into Mason's taser-related death
is part of apparently long-standing policy on the company's part to intervene
as early as possible to protect the Taser brand from bad publicity. With some 500 taser-related American
deaths since 2001, Taser has already changed its characterization of its 50,000
volt stun gun from "non-lethal" to "less lethal."

Taser's approach to taser deaths is to challenge anyone
suggesting that taser was in any way to blame. Last July when OpEdNews.com ran a story headlined, "Taser
Death In Vermont: Trooper Zaps Unarmed Epileptic Artist," Stacey Todd of Taser International
posted a comment asserting that: "It's premature to describe Mr. Mason's death
as a "Taser death.' To simply
infer that the use of one police tool may be to be to blame for this man's death
is irresponsible as there are no facts to support that causal
relationship."

All reports of the event of June 20 are consistent, relating
that when trooper David Schaeffer shot his taser at Macadam Mason, Mason
dropped to the ground and never regained consciousness. He was taken to a
hospital in NH where he was pronounced dead.

When asked, "do you think Mason would be dead even if no
taser was used," the Taser International spokesperson did not answer the
question. Instead, Stacey Todd
wrote that: "Until a medical expert, coroner or medical examiner, determines a
cause of death it's speculation to state that the Taser device caused Mr.
Mason's death."

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In fact, in three different cases in Ohio in 2005-06, when
the Chief Medical examiner's office in Summit County, Ohio, made exactly that
determination, Taser International took the county to court. After a four-day trial in 2008, Ohio Judge
Ted Schneiderman found for Taser on every item in the company's complaint, as
well as some items it had not requested, and ordered the medical examiner to
re-write three separate death certificates.

The judge's
13-page decision in May 2008 described three events that unambiguously included
tasers and fatalities, as well other factors like extreme drug use, a badly
slashed wrist, serious mental impairment, and obesity. These descriptions alone raise doubts
about the taser use directly causing any of the three deaths, but tasers were
indeed deployed just a matter of minutes before each of three men died, belying
the judge's conclusion that: "The Taser device had nothing to do with their
deaths." [emphasis added]

In Arizona, where Taser International is based in
Scottsdale, the Arizona Republic newspaper of Phoenix covered the decision in a
story
that starts: "Taser International has fired a warning shot at medical examiners
across the country. The
Scottsdale-based stun gun manufacturer increasingly is targeting state and county
medical examiners with lawsuits and lobbying efforts to reverse and prevent
medical rulings that Tasers contributed to someone's death."

The medical examiner appealed
the decision on seven separate issues, getting upheld on one and denied on
the rest. In April 2009, the three-judge
appeals court denied the medical examiner's constitutional due process argument
on the ground that it had not been raised in the original trial. The appeals court also reversed the trial
judge for granting Taser items it had not requested.

In a pointed dissent, Judge Donna J. Carr
argued that Taser International had no
basis for bringing the suit in the first place "because it has not suffered
an actual injury and because the interests it seeks to protect do not fall
within the zone of interest to be protected by the statute." The statute in question is concerned
with preserving the integrity and finality of cause-of-death
determinations.

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Judge Carr went on to say that the cases the majority cited
to support its position "involved persons with direct interests in the cause of
death of the decedent, such as persons accused in the death, not corporations
seeking to make a preemptive strike to preclude lawsuits from being filed
against it."

In Ohio, at least, "the controversy of medical examiners and
Taser-related deaths" continued to make news in 2012 when WCPO-TV in Cincinnati
looked into the taser-related death of a
teenager that was ruled "unknown/undetermined" after he was tasered
by a police officer. That
ruling was challenged
by the family's attorney who said, "He's a very clean and upstanding kid, very
healthy kid...and the only thing that happened that night is he was Tased and
then he died and she's saying this doesn't matter, the Taser doesn't matter...I
don't think so."

WCPO also reported
on a 2003 study by the Dept. of Defense that discussed the difficulty of
assessing tasers as a cause-of-death, since electric shock leaves no
tracks. Without direct evidence, medical examiners must rely on
inference to assess the elements of a death, the same inferences that seemed so
obvious to the Summit County medical examiner until Taser took her to court.

Vermonter living in Woodstock:
elected to five terms (served 20 years) as side judge (sitting in Superior, Family, and Small Claims Courts);
public radio producer, "The Panther Program" -- nationally distributed, three albums (at CD Baby), some (more...)